Advancing the Science of Contentious Politics

Democracy is an ongoing process that involves society as a whole, not merely politics. Anti-gender politics challenges democratization in all areas of society. Therefore, a gendered theory of society ...

This article addresses why movement scholars had no idea that the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 70s were imminent. In fact, their theories led them to predict that these movements were impossible because only whites possessed history-making agency. These scholars accepted the dogma that black people, their culture, and their institutions were inferior and incapable of organizing and leading powerful movements. This article demonstrates that the black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois predicted those movements a half century before they occurred. He did so because he conducted concrete empirical analyses of the black community, and his lived experiences led him to reject the thesis of black inferiority. This article argues that the field of social movements remains too white and elitist and that this condition causes less robust and accurate analysis. The article suggests ways to make needed changes.

While many social movement studies mention the idea of authenticity, few consider the authentication processes in movements. This article examines how authenticity challenges manifest in different arenas of movement/countermovement struggles. Through a qualitative analysis of minority organizations engaged in an abortion debate, I focus on how racial minorities demonstrate authenticity to legitimate their ability to represent their community's views on abortion. I argue that both sides engage in proximity practices that emphasize their movement's congruence while pointing to perceived incongruence of the opposition. After demonstrating how these practices are used in three arenas, I suggest areas for researchers to examine in future studies on minorities in movements and beyond.

Scholars of social movements tend to regard professionals as a homogeneous group whose activism plays a secondary role in mobilization processes. In this article, I focus on activism driven by professionals themselves and therein examine how heterogeneous professionals participate in their activism. Drawing on the case of the Guantánamo habeas lawyers, I utilize a two-step methodology to investigate the factors that contribute to the differential participation of legal professionals. The first stage of analysis shows that while lawyers with higher status played a critical role in initiating professional activism under a hostile environment, the Rasul v. Bush ruling opened up a legal opportunity for lawyers with lower status to participate in activism. In the second stage, social network analyses of the lawyers' collaborative structure reveal that movement-affiliated lawyers played a bridging role that coordinated initiators and latecomers. The results have important implications for understanding professionals' participation in contentious politics.

This article examines how embodied experience and the accompanying emotions help social movement allies to forge collective identity. The analysis is based on the Migrant Trail, an annual protest event in which allies of the border-justice movement spend a week walking seventy-five miles through the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to protest migrant deaths. Original data include four years of participant observation, interviews conducted during the 2011 Migrant Trail, and surveys conducted a year and a half after the event. Findings suggest that embodied and emotional experiences help allies overcome challenges such as social distance from beneficiaries, a lack of credibility in the movement, and no lineage of resistance. This study contributes to an understanding of collective identity formation among allies and offers an illustrative case for the important role embodiment plays in the emotions of collective action.

I argue that social movement scholars should conduct more comparative research. Comparison is needed to decide whether findings are unique for a specific movement, typical for a country, or vary over time, places, issues, and activities. The focal question of my work has always been, Why do some people participate in collective action while others do not? The answer to that question differs at different points in time, in different societies, and for different issues and activities. The question is why? We need comparative studies to answer that question. A short theoretical exposé presents the conceptual core of the research to be presented. The remainder of the article provides a review of a number of studies with various comparative designs. Movements exist in diverging contexts, as the studies presented illustrate. Comparative designs are rare in the field of social movement studies. I close the essay with a call for standardization. Without standardization we will not be able to experience the virtue of comparison.

This article considers the phenomenon of MAGAism as a general, “big-umbrella” social movement to probe its structure and persistence. Drawing on my research on nationalist movements, I discuss the narrative flexibility and emotional power of nationalism and consider how these characteristics fuel a particularly resentful form of majoritarian nationalism—MAGAism. I identify five points of entry for MAGA participation, starting with this bitter majoritarian nationalism, then populism, then traditional conservatism, next a Trumpian personality cult, and ending with the alt-right’s extreme white supremacism and fascism. I then discuss two forces that gather this unlikely collection of groups and individuals under the MAGA umbrella: (1) the flexibility of social identity and how it allows status-threat narratives to subsume and redirect economic and political claims; (2) the social media environment of the 2020s, cut loose from the traditional gatekeepers of news and information, wherein maximizing hits—not accuracy—is the guiding principle. On the one hand, social media intensify the prominence of the demagogic celebrity at the helm of the Republican Party, Donald J. Trump. On the other hand, alt-right trolls compete for prominence by seeking outrageousness and shock value, enhanced by algorithms that create a closed information environment. These social media trends pull MAGA adherents further to the right by inflaming public discourse and building the movement on lies and conspiracies.

Innovative methods are enhancing our ability to measure the impact of framing on public perception, yet our understanding of the factors influencing frame resonance remains incomplete. This study investigates the differential effects of frames on diverse groups, proposing that both social positioning and the cultural context, alongside the qualities of the frames themselves, are significant. Drawing upon framing theory and feminist standpoint theories, I examine the vegan movement to understand the immediate impact of frames and social locations on their resonance. I employ an intersectional approach to analyze varying responses across gendered racial demographics, especially in response to radical narratives, using data from a new national survey of 498 United States participants. The findings show that individuals facing multiple forms of marginalization are more inclined to respond to frames that challenge existing power structures than those with multiple privileges. This suggests the critical role of standpoint in evaluating the validity of claims, highlighting the complex ways in which frames resonate across different social locations.

Social networks and interpersonal ties are critical to social movements. They help recruit members, sustain organizations, nourish participants' movement identities, and disseminate information. Scholarship has pointed to the formative role of social media and other information and communication technologies in online and offline mobilization. Questions remain, however, regarding how online social and friendship networks shape social movements. In this article, I draw from literature on social networks, online mobilization, and women's movements to examine the role of online feminist social networks in feminist mobilization. Presenting qualitative data from a racially and geographically heterogeneous group of college feminists, I argue that Facebook and feminist blogs enlarge and nourish feminist networks, create online feminist communities, expand recruitment bases for online and offline mobilization, and increase opportunities for online interaction with adversaries. Finally, I consider generational shifts in the feminist movement, and the broader relationship between friendship networks and online and offline mobilization.

For social movement organizations to create impact, broadcasting the dWUNCness (diversity, worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment) of protest is crucial. Public representations of dWUNC are inherent to social movements’ existence and increase the legitimacy of their acts. However, to what extent do social movement organizations claim dWUNC? Which dWUNC elements do they focus on? And, which protest and social movement features explain their dWUNC claims? In this study, I analyze Twitter and Facebook messages (N = 2,849) of social movement organizations (N = 186) about street protests (N = 232) staged in Brussels (Belgium). Descriptives show that in 67.7% (N =1,929) of their online protest messages, social movements speak in terms of dWUNC. Unity was frequently claimed, and dWUNC was communicated differently across social media platforms. Explanatory analyses show that social movements display dWUNC in and outside the boundaries of protest reality. Findings reveal the outcome of movements’ protest communication strategy in today's digital media landscape.

The far-right social movement in Sweden is mobilizing against the purported threat to national order posed by the “badlands” of the nation. These are neighborhoods known for their diversity, crime, and poverty. “Badlands” also provide the far right with sites to criticize immigration and multiculturalism. Crucially, they also serve as a new kind of space that the far right uses to organize against what it believes to be a crisis of the state’s loss of the monopoly on violence and fears of the “replacement” of the ethnic majority. Through interviews with movement activists and ethnographic observations of private and public movement events, I show that the nostalgic “homelands and heartlands” frames, coupled with fears of the “badlands,” motivate far-right activists to participate in collective action. I find Sweden’s far-right relies on the interaction between nativism and territorial stigmatization to signify these urban spaces with crime, Islam, and minoritization.

Why has the religious right been more influential in the United States than in Canada? Traditional approaches to the study of social movements focus only on the life of the movement, from emergence to decline. Instead, I conduct a historical, comparative analysis on the premovement activities of evangelical Christian communities in these two countries from 1925–1975. Employing insights from historical institutionalism, I identify two critical junctures in the historical development of evangelical communities that suppressed the entrepreneurship and institution-building activities of Canadian evangelicals relative to those in the United States. I find that these divergences in institution building affected the size and strength of the institutional infrastructures—supportive organizations, networks, and resources—of the religious right movements in these countries. I argue that historical, comparative analysis in general, and historical institutionalism in particular, is useful to social movement scholarship's understanding of crossnational movement comparisons.

Based on longitudinal ethnographic research, this article explores what the concepts of collective identity and subjectivity contribute in the case of the undocumented youth movement in Los Angeles. I show that while the collective identity of the Dreamers has been used to organize undocumented youth from different backgrounds and regions into a recognizable collective actor successfully engaged in political action, nowadays the Dreamer identity is a matter of contention among undocumented youth. I show that the basis of subjective sharing and belonging is now less derived from the collective identity of the Dreamer and more from the shared subjectivities of undocumented youths, constituted by embodied experiences of exclusion, stigmatization, and empowerment. I thus argue for a stronger engagement with the concept of subjectivity in social movement research, as it offers a greater understanding of the profound effects of embodied and affective experiences of negative discursive positioning, trauma, emancipation, and healing.

On January 21, 2017, over four hundred cities across the United States organized sister marches in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington. In this paper, we first compare the size of these marches to that of several significant protest-event sources to show how extraordinary turnout was that day. Then, analyzing a nationally representative sample of sister marches, we present univariate statistics for both event-level characteristics (such as demographics of participants or types of speakers) and mobilization processes (such as composition of organizing teams or recruitment efforts). We situate the descriptive findings in the broader literature on protest events and the women's movement to identify how they converge or diverge from established patterns. In addition, our study shows that many event-level characteristics of the sister marches were distinct relative to a recent national study of protests. Also discussed are the ways in which our results contribute to understanding the sister marches' success in mobilizing millions of people to take to the streets.

This article explores the case of glitter bombing, a short-lived form of protest in the LGBT rights movement, to understand the mechanisms behind the decline of a novel tactic. To date, little attention has been directed toward tactics that have disappeared from movement repertoires. Using interview data, I find that glitter bombing declined due to many of the same factors that initially provided momentum for its diffusion. First, it was specific to LGBT rights to the degree that the audience of potential adopters was limited. At the same time, the radical nature of glitter bombing meant that adopters were peripheral movement actors who lacked organizational support. Activists dedicated limited resources to gaining media attention and online popularity, often at the cost of other crucial aspects of mobilization. Finally, an increase in repression multiplied these challenges by posing risks to adopters and shifting media coverage away from the tactic's celebratory framing.

The influential work of Tilly and Tarrow on social movement repertoire transitions—moving from older, local, and episodic tactics to newer, national, and sustained tactics—has contributed significantly to the development of social movements theory. This article expands Tilly and Tarrow's theoretical framework by drawing on examples from Nigeria and Kenya. First, we examine the causal factors contributing to repertoire transitions in these postcolonial African countries, highlighting the importance of colonial state formation and social networks in changing repertoires. Second, we consider how the gravity and effectiveness of women's nakedness, used by mothers as a collective action tactic to shame those targeted, persisted and maintained its significance across tactical repertoire transitions, despite colonial repression. We argue that the continuance of tactics across repertoire transitions lies in their ability to maintain symbolic resonance, which simultaneously restricts the transmission of tactics to other locations.

We demonstrate that an important outcome of social movements is public opinion change, particularly in the case of the U.S. women's movement. We argue that contentious events associated with the women's movement provide informational cues that prime the public. This process then leads to changes in attitudes regarding gender. We use quarterly time series data on contentious events of the U.S. women's movement ranging from 1960 to 1992 and public opinion about gender attitudes in the United States to examine whether public opinion moves in response to social movement events. Using an error correction model, we demonstrate that social movement events have a significant effect on gender attitudes. Citizens adopt more liberal gender attitudes as the U.S. women's movement increases its activity. These results suggest that social movement scholars should be paying more attention to public opinion when assessing the outcomes of social movements.

The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of “shadow mobilization” to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk and intensifying knowledge-based conflict. Second, we introduce a new methodological approach for collecting systematic data on members of this difficult-to-reach population. Findings from comparative analysis of expert activists in the environmental justice movement in Louisiana and the alternative agriculture movement in Washington reveal both important commonalities and fine-grained differences, suggesting that shadow mobilizations are strategic collective responses to cumulative risk in contemporary society.